According to Bly, American readers "can't tell when a man is counterfeiting and when he isn't." What might this view of one's audience imply for one's artistic integrity?
In his American Poetry: Wilderness and Domesticity, Robert Bly defines the literary device known as “image”: “An image and a picture differ, in that the image being the natural speech of the imagination, cannot be drawn from or inserted back into the natural world. “ Bly seems to be focusing entirely on visual imagery, as he defines “image” against “picture”; imagery, of course, includes specific language that may represent each of the five senses, not just sight.
For example, two lines from Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night,” contain an image that appeals to sight, sound, and smell: “A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch / And blue spurt of a lighted match.” These lines portray a lover tapping at the window of his beloved: we can see him and hear his tapping. He then strikes a match, and we can hear the match head scraping against some rough object, we can see the flame, and we can also smell the sulfur from the match as it bursts into flame.
Imagination and Memory
We have, indeed, used our imaginations to help us see, hear, and smell these images. Not only imagination but also memory. We must be able to remember the smell of a match or the sound of a tap on a windowpane, in order to be able to grasp the drama that Browning has created. Is this portrayal simply “picturism” because our grasp of it “can be drawn from [and] inserted back into the natural world”?
Imagination and memory work together in our understanding of any text. The memory consists of information that is in the memory repository (the subconscious, often misconstrued as “the unconscious”), while the imagination works at connecting information gathered from experience, feelings, and thoughts, all of which are represented by language.
If our memory and imagination were not capable of acting on language this way, we would not be able to understand any text. We cannot understand a language we have not learned, because words of the foreign language are not stored in our memory; the imagination has nothing to which it can connect the unknown words.
If, however, an image is, as Bly defines it, the “natural language of speech” but “cannot be drawn from or inserted back into the natural world,” then how can we ever understand the image? If the imagination is a place where sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch do not hold those things that comprise the “natural world,” then what is within the purview of the imagination?
Today’s Poetry is Without the Image
While Bly’s definition of the image as something that cannot be drawn from or returned to the natural world is absurd, so is his claim that “The poetry we have now is a poetry without the image.” This statement is false, not only false but impossible.
Here are a few examples of contemporary poems that definitely are not without the image: from Linda Pastan’s “The Cossacks”, “those are hoofbeats / on the frosty autumn air,” from Ted Kooser’s “Dishwater,” “a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands / and hangs there shining for fifty years / over the mystified chickens,” and from Donald Hall’s “The Painted Bed,” “Grisly, foul, and terrific / is the speech of bones.” These samples of images from contemporary poems belie Bly’s claim.
Perhaps, Bly’s idiosyncratic definition follows from the unmeritorious assertion that our poetry is without the image. The image as defined by Bly cannot be found in any poetry, because no such image can exist.
Counterfeiting
Also in his American Poetry: Wilderness and Domesticity, Bly assaults the work of the poet Robert Lowell, particularly Lowell’s For the Union Dead. Bly quotes several passages that he particularly despises, calling them “coarse and ugly,” “unimaginative,” and then explains that Lowell is counterfeiting, “pretending to be saying passionate things . . . , and the passage means nothing at all.”
This book of prose ramblings demonstrates, one might argue, the bankruptcy of Bly’s own critical vision, and his chapter on Lowell, titled “Robert Lowell’s Bankruptcy,” is one of the most revealing; the exact weaknesses for which Bly criticizes Lowell attach to Bly.
Quite possibly, Bly reveals the reason that he has been able to “counterfeit” a career in poetry, when he says, “. . . for American readers are so far from standing at the center of themselves that they can’t tell when a man is counterfeiting and when he isn’t.” (emphasis added) Is this, perhaps, an admission regarding your own art, Mr. Bly?
If an artist espouses such a derogatory notion about his audience, what is there to keep him honest? What does this imply about the integrity of his own art?
